The New York premiere for upcoming comedy 'Top Five' took place at the Ziegfeld Theater and saw a variety of guests among the usual cast and crew members - which included director and star Chris Rock and co-producer Kanye West.

Relationships between fathers and sons must be the "in" topic for Hollywood. Road to Perdition was a moving story about the sacrifices made by generations of mob fathers to provide for their boys. Similar relationships are presented in City by the Sea; however, this film explores the opposite phenomenon. In City by the Sea, the lack of sacrifice by two generations of fathers has lasting repercussions on their children.

City by the Sea is inspired by the true events surrounding the life of New York City Homicide Detective Vincent LaMarca. A veteran of the police force, LaMarca (Robert De Niro) returns to the boardwalks of Long Beach, Long Island (a.k.a. City by the Sea), where he grew up, to investigate a homicide that his son Joey (James Franco) is under suspicion of committing. Vincent and Joey have been estranged since Vincent divorced his wife (Patti LuPone) 14 years ago. As a result, Joey has fallen into the pitfalls of drugs and vagrancy. When a drug deal goes bad, and Joey kills the dealer in the ensuing struggle, he becomes the target of many overzealous police officers who want to charge him with the crime. Joey is also the target for another drug dealer (William Forsythe) who wants the drug money he thinks Joey stole.

In a game effort to deflect the immediate suspicions of most viewers likely to be mistrustful of its all-too-convenient cast of wildly entertaining eccentrics, the young boy narrating Running with Scissors acknowledges, somewhat ruefully, early on that "nobody's going to believe me anyway." It's a smart maneuver, given what follows in this overly energetic adaptation of Augusten Burroughs' bestselling 2002 memoir about growing up in the 1970s with a mentally damaged mother who sent him off to be raised by her psychiatrist in his house of David Lynch-ian strangeness. As it stands, Running with Scissors is best taken as a literary memoir and not judged on its complete veracity but whether it works as a story of flawed people in an environment that seems to cater to all their worst impulses. It almost does.

The film opens in 1972, showing a young Augusten as an audience of one for his mother Deirdre's in-home poetry reading, microphone and all. The bilious, self-aggrandizing manner with which Deirdre (Annette Bening) gives her reading tells you pretty much all you need to know about the opinion she holds as to her place in the world and any who may disagree. Any remaining questions about her fitfulness as a mother are answered when the film jumps to its primary setting in the late '70s, where Deirdre has become a whirling dervish of arrogant fury and spite. Her obsessive belief that she is an important poet being kept from her rightful place at the center of the literary firmament drives away first Augusten's father (Alec Baldwin, lightly soused) and then Augusten, whom she decides would be better off living with her exceedingly unorthodox psychiatrist, Dr. Finch (Brian Cox). A devout and at least partially mad Freudian of the most unrecondite sort, Finch keeps a special room next to his doctor's office which he calls The Masturbatorium and divines the future from the shape of his bowel movements. Seemingly he's not much of a father figure.

Just as Spike Lee took a basic caper and added his own pet issues to elevate Inside Man to the upper echelons of its genre, Martin Scorsese has taken The Departed, based on an intriguingly simple premise, to its own heights by infusing issues that have concerned him ever since Mean Streets. Along the way, he makes room for some memorable performances, not the least of which comes from the most likely of sources.

The Departed is based on the Hong Kong blockbuster Infernal Affairs, in which a cop goes undercover in the mob while the mob places one of their own as a mole in the police force. In Scorsese's version, the scene shifts to Boston, where mob boss Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson) puts loyal-from-boyhood employee Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon) through police training. As Sullivan rises through the ranks, Special Investigations Unit chiefs Queenan (Martin Sheen) and Dignam (Mark Wahlberg) recruit rookie Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio) to get "kicked off" the force and do time to gain Costello's confidence.

In a game effort to deflect the immediate suspicions of most viewers likely to be mistrustful of its all-too-convenient cast of wildly entertaining eccentrics, the young boy narrating Running with Scissors acknowledges, somewhat ruefully, early on that "nobody's going to believe me anyway." It's a smart maneuver, given what follows in this overly energetic adaptation of Augusten Burroughs' bestselling 2002 memoir about growing up in the 1970s with a mentally damaged mother who sent him off to be raised by her psychiatrist in his house of David Lynch-ian strangeness. As it stands, Running with Scissors is best taken as a literary memoir and not judged on its complete veracity but whether it works as a story of flawed people in an environment that seems to cater to all their worst impulses. It almost does.The film opens in 1972, showing a young Augusten as an audience of one for his mother Deirdre's in-home poetry reading, microphone and all. The bilious, self-aggrandizing manner with which Deirdre (Annette Bening) gives her reading tells you pretty much all you need to know about the opinion she holds as to her place in the world and any who may disagree. Any remaining questions about her fitfulness as a mother are answered when the film jumps to its primary setting in the late '70s, where Deirdre has become a whirling dervish of arrogant fury and spite. Her obsessive belief that she is an important poet being kept from her rightful place at the center of the literary firmament drives away first Augusten's father (Alec Baldwin, lightly soused) and then Augusten, whom she decides would be better off living with her exceedingly unorthodox psychiatrist, Dr. Finch (Brian Cox). A devout and at least partially mad Freudian of the most unrecondite sort, Finch keeps a special room next to his doctor's office which he calls The Masturbatorium and divines the future from the shape of his bowel movements. Seemingly he's not much of a father figure.Once it deposits the relatively colorless Augusten (Joseph Cross) in the house, the film throws an abundance of vivid characters at us, from Finch's pet-food-eating wife Agnes (Jill Clayburgh) to his daughters -- best described as the slutty one (Evan Rachel Wood) and the religious one (Gwyneth Paltrow) -- and the definitely insane son (Joseph Fiennes, uncomfortably bad) who starts an affair with the far-too-young Augusten. But the film is unable to make them much more than cartoon characters in Finch's filthy, falling-down house of oddities where dead cats receive full burials and pharmaceuticals are handed out like Pez.Writer/director Ryan Murphy (Nip/Tuck) knows that the material in his hands has the potential for humor, that queasy kind of if-you-don't-laugh-you'll-cry sort of funny which Burroughs uses as a coping device in his writing. What works in the book, however, comes off on film as shallow and mocking; we're laughing at these damaged people. Murphy scores too many scenes with well-worn and not terribly appropriate '70s pop chestnuts, playing it all for the easy punchline, making the film too often a shallow exercise in retro camp.There are, nevertheless, two reasons to see Running with Scissors, and they are Bening and Cox. Bening could well be accused of shamelessly going for the Oscar with her full-throttle and stage-clearing performance, but given the fearsomely focused pathos that results, it's hard to complain. Cox is as always the consummate professional who underplays as everyone else overplays, finding the sly humor and magisterial authority at the heart of his unapologetically crude patriarch. Although playing self-absorbed narcissists of the worst kind, given the half-formed caricatures flitting around them, Bening and Cox make their characters by far the film's most endearing; not a good sign for everyone else involved.And take your plate to the kitchen, too.

Just as Spike Lee took a basic caper and added his own pet issues to elevate Inside Man to the upper echelons of its genre, Martin Scorsese has taken The Departed, based on an intriguingly simple premise, to its own heights by infusing issues that have concerned him ever since Mean Streets. Along the way, he makes room for some memorable performances, not the least of which comes from the most likely of sources.

The Departed is based on the Hong Kong blockbuster Infernal Affairs, in which a cop goes undercover in the mob while the mob places one of their own as a mole in the police force. In Scorsese's version, the scene shifts to Boston, where mob boss Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson) puts loyal-from-boyhood employee Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon) through police training. As Sullivan rises through the ranks, Special Investigations Unit chiefs Queenan (Martin Sheen) and Dignam (Mark Wahlberg) recruit rookie Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio) to get "kicked off" the force and do time to gain Costello's confidence.

For a guy who's earned a reputation for being one of the most original filmmakers on earth, Tim Burton has an awfully large fondness for remakes. And what a mixed bag they are: His hit Batman spawned a huge movie franchise, while his Planet of the Apes stands as one of the most widely trashed films in recent memory.

And so Burton takes a third stab at the remake game with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, an update/remake (call it what you want) of the beloved 1971 movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and Roald Dahl's classic children's novel. But the stakes here are far greater than they were with Apes. That was a campy sci-fi movie that no one really cared about. In fact, the original Apes had long since killed itself under the weight of four increasingly awful sequels. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory frequently tops "Favorite Movie Ever" lists, and news of the remake has met with nothing but scorn from fans (including 1971 star Gene Wilder, who later retracted his scathing remarks).

Bruno Barreto's View from the Top begins with small-town beauty Donna's (a miscast Gwyneth Paltrow) head planted firmly in the clouds. She enrolls in flight school as a means for escaping her monotonous life, but turbulence lies ahead. She finds - and then loses - true love with a ruggedly handsome law student (Mark Ruffalo), and encounters opposition from a rival stewardess (Christina Applegate) she once considered a friend. These obstacles stand in the way of Donna's ultimate goal: to work the first-class cabin on the Paris flight for Royal Airlines.

Antoine Fuqua tries to blend Hong Kong action fare with gritty urban sensibilities in The Replacement Killers, to mixed effect. Surprisingly, Mira Sorvino holds her own as an unlikely action star, and the shots of her ass don't hurt matters.